


Inner Sanctum

by Quantum_Witch, Vulgarweed



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Art appreciation, Bathroom Sex, M/M, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), Rimming, Semi-Public Sex, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-08 04:07:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19099429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quantum_Witch/pseuds/Quantum_Witch, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulgarweed/pseuds/Vulgarweed
Summary: Illustrated Fic!  Total smut, with high raunchiness quotient. In which there is naughty art appreciation, public toilet sex, and Crowley pushes Aziraphale’s boundaries—with his tongue. Oh yeah, and cigar smoking.Author's Note: AN: No way can I take full blame, er, credit for this: QW threw the most detailed bunny at me that I’ve ever received from someone else, to the point of extensively documenting a restaurant I’ve never seen. Another redefinition of "collaboration." Thanks to waxbean for the beta!Originally written for our private collaboration community Switchythings on LJ, in May 2006. It's never been posted anywhere else before now.





	Inner Sanctum

“…But Love has pitched his mansion in  
The place of excrement;  
For nothing can be sole or whole  
That has not been rent.”  
\--W. B. Yeats, “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop”

 

“It’s wonderful. It looks like the late Byzantine Empire went on a bender with the Italian Baroque, and they were sick together all over it.”

“And you should know.”

“Those were good times. As much as I like this place in theory, I don’t think I can actually eat here. I don’t like the décor so loud I can’t hear myself chew.”

“It’s not my fault the Ritz is closed for…renovations.”

“I still think it is your fault,” said Crowley with a hint of unconvincing threat. “You want to start it up again? How many restaurants do you want to destroy in a week, Aziraphale?”

“One will suffice, dear.”

“Watch it, then.”

“It’s the memory alterations that were the hardest part, really.”

That venerable London institution had withstood many things over its decades, but a quietly mortified angel and demon were in agreement about the need to leave the place in peace while it healed from the wounds it had accrued as an innocent bystander in a wildly complex quarrel that had something to do with a sex scandal in Parliament, an Irish environmental activist group, a misunderstanding over the _Malleus Maleficarum_ that kept coming up every 200 years or so, a Witchfinder trying to claim payment from both of them, and a narrowly averted Apocalypse—specifically, what exactly it had meant when a precocious child had moved his hand and the world _changed._

After all, the world had actually changed for Crowley and Aziraphale twice. Once out there in Lower Tadfield. Then again later in Crowley’s bed, where the two of them, drunk on wine and relief, had taken up a most earthly dance - the very oldest one, the one all the others merely suggest, the one that involves skin and whispers, hips and hands, and the sort of playful power struggles no one really loses. And having done that once (or more), one (or two) would be strongly disinclined to stop doing it without a very good reason, which they did not have (and did not look for very hard).

There had been surprisingly little anxious discussion about What It All Meant; for it was clear really – the rescued Earth exerted its influence over all who walked upon it, and if it, and they, were still present, they were going to appreciate it for all it was worth. Perhaps the Ineffable Plan didn’t like being looked in the mouth, to mix a metaphor as thoroughly as Crowley and Aziraphale mixed spit and sweat, sin and sanctity, and got all tangled up in each other’s drunken lines of reasoning.

It did lend their debates about whose turn it was to do whose job—especially since they were both privately afraid they might actually be unemployed and no one had bothered to tell them—a certain added virulence, however. It might have been better for all concerned had the two of them vented their newfound emotional intensity by sexually assaulting each other on the table amid the wreckage of china, but they had stubbornly clung to their performance of a mere _argument_ , which proved only slightly more decorous and considerably more destructive.

Which is why they were dining at the Sarastro instead.

“Have you considered taking up the tambourine?” Crowley grinned, nodding at a painting of an angel that stood out even in such busy ambience.

“Not since the early Ottoman days, no,” Aziraphale grumbled, noting the angel’s black wings and wondering what Crowley would say if he whipped out a pair of _those._ The lamb Anatolian style did bring back memories. And Aziraphale was trying awfully hard to fight off the thought that the curtains around their balcony table had a certain boudoirishness about them, and really, it wouldn’t be the worst place in the world to do what they should have done in the first place instead of venting their frustrations on the poor innocent Ritz.

Risky, to act too much like an all-too-normal human when one simply isn’t. But try telling Adam Young that.

There was normal, and then there was normal; the meal, per se, was certainly normal, but the conversation, such as it was, was reassuringly not so, and Crowley’s foot had brushed his ankle too many times for it to be accidental. The threshold for acceptable unintended contact was three; they’d established that boundary back in the eighteenth century.

It was then that the music started. Live and in person. Part of the risk one runs with theme restaurants, Aziraphale supposed. He hoped there wouldn’t be a repeat of that incident with the violinist in Barcelona years ago.

Crowley sighed long-sufferingly and threw his napkin on the table with the dramatic flair of an overcompensating flamenco dancer.

“Where are you going?” Aziraphale asked as Crowley got up.

“The loo, of course,” Crowley smiled.

Well, no, not of course; it was actually inexplicable. Aziraphale poked at his food irritably, wondering if he was about to be ditched with the bill. Granted, Crowley hadn’t actually pulled that stunt since that awkward incident in Berlin just before the war when Aziraphale had made some choice comments about Crowley’s apparel and the company he was keeping, but old wounds die hard in the immortal.

“Still there,” the demon said happily on his return, easing back into his seat.

“What?”

“Oh, don’t rely on my meagre descriptive skills. You should go see for yourself.”

“I have no need to – “

“Who said anything about need? You do have curiosity, though, don’t you?”

“It’s not as if I’ve never seen one-“

“But you haven’t seen _this_ one, have you?”

“I can’t imagine what could make it so special . . . ”

“Which is why you need to see it. Go on. I’ll wait.”

And Crowley did. He took a few more deep sips of wine, and counted slowly to thirty. He almost made it, too; he teetered for a second or two on the precarious edge of admitting that perhaps Aziraphale’s influence was improving his attention span.

***

Aziraphale should have seen it coming. An establishment so deep in its own _aesthetic_ had to be making excuses for something, and that something was painted on the walls in here. It all started off with curvy naked witches doing things to each other in the presence of demons more generously endowed than any he’d ever met (though he doubted he’d mention that to Crowley). Straight out of the _Malleus Maleficarum_ , actually, though there was a certain good-natured hedonism about it that dour document - written as it was by churchmen never invited to the good orgies - conspicuously lacked.

Inside it was worse, or better, depending on your point of view. Aziraphale could have sworn he saw crude renditions of beings he recognised, wings and legs splayed, piled on and around each other in delirious and unlikely combinations. _Humans_ thought this up, he reminded himself, fantasising about the divine and the damned and the diabolical interlocked in ways that would have made the followers of Pan blush. (Pan himself had been spotted downstairs in sculpture form, staying out of the fray but apparently enjoying watching a great deal. Though it was hard to tell with him since he was _always_ in that state.) The style was nothing special, and yet, there was something to be said for…

Oh yes, a urinal there, and some human man pushing past him for business far more urgent. Ah well.

Understandably, he was getting the fisheye--but what were these images for, if not to be gawped at? Surely the artist would be hurt at the thought of so many quick whizzes with no attention paid to his prurient masterpiece: someone ought to give it some quality time.

He had twitched and blanched at a terrifyingly accurate likeness of himself, fully dressed and awkward in the midst of it all with another man-shaped being advancing upon him with lustful intent, before he realised he was actually looking in a mirror.

“I was afraid you’d fallen in,” said Crowley. “To the mural, I mean. Might have to go on a rescue mission.”

“You shouldn’t leave the table, they’ll think we tried to skip.”

“No they won’t,” the demon said most assuredly. “Enjoying the art?”

“Actually,” Aziraphale said, “It’s not nearly so well-done as those mosaics at that place outside Pompeii, if you remember…”

“The bathhouse, yes, I do remember,” said Crowley. “When were _you_ there?”

Aziraphale was still looking at the mirror, watching just how closely Crowley was approaching. They really did appear to be from different worlds this way, and yet…

He _saw_ the hands slipping around his waist before he _felt_ them, and that was an odd sensation. If they’d had clothes off and wings out they’d have fit right into the murals…well, give or take a few pounds and a few lines and a certain lack of artistic license in the way their human bodies actually were….

“Crowley!” Aziraphale objected, eyeing a deliberately oblivious malingerer.

“Can’t help it,” Crowley said quietly, and there was his mouth settling on Aziraphale’s ear in just the precise way he’d noted two nights ago made the angel shiver rapidly, “it gives me ideas.”

“Blank walls give you ideas,” Aziraphale sighed.

“That mirror’s a good idea,” Crowley said. “I think I’ll get one. For every room.”

It wasn’t of much use to Aziraphale any longer, for he closed his eyes at the sensation of his shirt collar being pushed aside by Crowley’s tongue, but when he opened them again briefly he only saw the reflection of some impassive human trying his best not to watch. He was about to articulate all his copious and well-reasoned objections to doing something like this in a place ostensibly somewhat public, when Crowley grabbed him by the necktie and yanked him into the only stall, which would never have dared to be occupied at that moment.

Door slammed on a small and intimate space, Aziraphale felt a little less afloat and was about to continue objecting. The art motif had continued even in here – they were nothing if not thorough. It was a few minutes into his gaze at a drawing of an angel praying, implausibly-sized male organ in some female creature’s mouth, that Aziraphale started to take it personally. _Oh no, my dear,_ he thought, _It was you she seduced, I had nothing to do with that._

Crowley just smiled at him like he saw all the objections coming. “Do you know _anything_ about human men at all after all these centuries?”

“I believe I _do.”_

“Filthy-minded creatures. They never let up. Hardly beyond the pale, this,” the demon muttered, one hand slowly untucking Aziraphale’s shirt and undoing button by button from the bottom up. “I mean, someday I’ll explain to you what a ‘glory hole’ is, and _then_ you’ll regret . . .”

“Actually,” Aziraphale stammered, one hand running slowly up the side of Crowley’s right leg to his hip, “ keep this quiet, but I think that one was . . . kind of _ours_ . . . an outgrowth of the Confessional and all . . . ”

“You’re such _perverts,”_ Crowley whispered admiringly, his hands finishing the last button at Aziraphale’s throat and then wandering back down in a leisurely manner; under linen, over skin. “So repressed, and then . . . ”

“Not _here,”_ Aziraphale groaned in one last-ditch effort, grabbing at Crowley’s wrists. “Someone will hear.”

“And if they do?” One slightly superhuman flick and it was Aziraphale’s wrists that were caught, up over his head against the wall while Crowley kissed him deeply and hungrily, graze of teeth across lower lip, tongue slipping in flirtatiously, working and waiting for the breathy, unvocalised moan in his mouth.

“It’s so . . . squalid,” Aziraphale gasped, nodding at the cramped little room, the footsteps and sounds of urinations and hand-washings outside, the toilet, all of it, even as Crowley’s hand bypassed his belt and sank lower and curled around the hard evidence that the angel’s performance of propriety was about to be over.

“That’sss the appeal,” Crowley said. “At least it’s clean.”

“Maybe . . . well . . . all right . . . but quickly . . . ” Aziraphale agreed, his tone suggesting his rush wasn’t so much getting-it-over-with as a sudden attack of nearly painful need.

“A silver-tongued seducer, you are,” Crowley laughed.

“That’s . . . _OH! _. . . your talent, not mine . . . and still it’s so tawdry, I have to say . . . ”__

“Hot, isn’t it?’

“You get . . . _excited_ . . .getting me to do things you think are unangelic, don’t you?” Aziraphale whispered, his voice going husky as he realised he was playing the game even as he called it out.

“I suppose that depends,” Crowley growled softly against Aziraphale’s neck. “Do you get hard thinking of me giving alms to the poor?”

“Depends . . . _aaah!_ . . . what kind of alms you mean . . .”

“The pity fuck was one of our better ideas but . . . _oh!_ . . . doesn’t matter, I’ve never . . . ”

Aziraphale’s hands and Crowley’s hands competed at each other’s belts, and with a snap of the demon’s fingers the murals expanded across the walls with a new addition: a slightly pudgy fair-haired creature and a leaner dark-haired one regarding each other with lascivious promise, wings beating rhythmically like young human hips in some nightclub courtship. Aziraphale had to look away and down then, and all he could see was Crowley’s hand moving at that same slow rhythm around his cock, dragging him down into pleasure’s long trance.

But to accept that wasn’t to surrender exactly, not so easily. There was Crowley’s shirt too, missing buttons now somehow, his trousers open and displaying curly dark hair and flesh that was flushed, tender, eager . . . _oh yes, you like that, don’t you?_

Aziraphale generally liked being underestimated; there was something so satisfying about showing Crowley he’d done it again. But this time he’d been beaten, and he knew it; kept off-guard too long by the notion of something vaguely shocking that really shouldn’t have been, and _mmmm!, oh . . . fuck, give it up; just let him…._

Still, Aziraphale thought it should have been more fair—hardly his turn to be so roughly spun around, grappling on to that not-pointless-after-all shelf over the toilet for balance, fighting for somewhere to put his legs and coming up with nothing that didn’t leave him awkward and vulnerable. He thought he knew what Crowley was going to do to him when he felt cool air suddenly surround him, and Aziraphale just hoped his trousers and underwear hadn’t been banished to somewhere difficult to retrieve them from later. (Their table, for example). Crowley’s hands were twisting in the wreckage of his shirt and coat and sliding down to his hips.

Panting and fretting, he couldn’t see the way Crowley was regarding the half-naked angel before him with truly desperate lust. The demon had never been struck so violently with sheer _craving_ at the sight of a crumpled tweed jacket and _sock suspenders_ before, his heightened senses acutely seizing on every tremble of rounded flesh, every sudden breath, every fair, downy hair. “I’m going to make you want to scream,” he managed to choke out. “But you better not.”

“Right! I’ll be quiet. Just . . . please . . . ” Please what? He had ideas, plenty of them, but none of them were what Crowley did; there was a rustle of disheveled clothing and a lusty little hiss as Crowley sank to his knees - behind him. Aziraphale was frozen as hands caressed the backs of his legs from ankle to knee and upward, fingertips examining the juncture of buttock and thigh, and then thumbs opening him slowly with something that felt rather like reverence. There was a puff of hot breath there, and then, at the very top of the cleft and sliding downwards, something that . . .

Wasn’t a finger, for one thing. Slim and wet and playful, making Aziraphale’s nerve endings—millions there, it seemed - fizz like ginger ale invaded rudely by ice cream. _Crowley’s tongue. There._ Aziraphale’s face went even redder and his cock went even harder and all his affronted decency collided abruptly with all his impatient arousal, and what came out of his mouth was a profound little yelp of _yes_ and _no_ at once. “Oh . . . you can’t, that’s just too . . . ”

“Quiet!” Crowley interrupted his work enough to murmur, giving one round cheek a little slap that was much louder than the sound Aziraphale had made, and Aziraphale smothered his next conflicted protest in his own arm.

What Crowley’s tongue was doing wasn’t just licking. It was dancing. It was flirting. It was threatening and then fulfilling; it was promising and then withholding. It was _slithering._ When Aziraphale squirmed, Crowley hummed a little and buried his face deeper, increasing his pressure and opening his lips to do just a little sucking, a little hint of devouring. When Aziraphale couldn’t keep a moan suppressed completely, Crowley turned his head a tiny bit and gave a place just slightly less sensitive a sharp nip before restoring it with a wet kiss, tongue apologising briefly before returning to the path of wickedness, darting and lapping and savouring and then finally, opening and penetrating.

Aziraphale gave in. Pushed backwards against him. Abandoned his myriad objections. Hadn’t known how easy it was to pick up human taboos as if from the air until Crowley pointed them out, laughed at them, turned them into something whose only reason for being was this sort of erotic assault upon the very _idea_ of inhibitions.

Crowley’s hands addressed all the territory his mouth alone couldn’t account for; elementary application of grip and slide, thumb and palm, more than sufficient to tip Aziraphale’s shuddering consciousness over its edge.

Aziraphale emerged from his epiphany with eyes horrified to see a bodily fluid of his hit a toilet for the first time in 2,000 years (there’d been an experiment in Rome, and he hadn’t seen the appeal. Now he most certainly did). He didn’t have much time to meditate upon it, though, for Crowley stood up and pressed against him, hand fisted roughly in his hair and jerking his face around for a piercing, musky kiss.

In his fog, Aziraphale thought he knew what Crowley had planned now, but he was in no mood now to be passively acted upon anymore. He turned his body around in Crowley’s embrace, bent impossibly for a confusing moment. Face heated and eyes blazing, he sat himself down on the toilet – of all things!—and took hold of Crowley’s hips, forcing that very insistent cock nearly all the way into his mouth.

It was Crowley’s turn to gasp and clutch at the shelf over Aziraphale for balance. The involuntary cry that came out of him earned him a vicious arse-grab and a warning graze of teeth over somewhere very sensitive, and a pair of darkened blue-grey eyes looking up at him accusingly.

Somewhere in Aziraphale’s librarian’s mind was a file of precisely all the things Crowley had ever done to him this way (and, truth be told, a few centuries’ worth of things he’d caught himself thinking it might be nice if Crowley did to him). It unfurled now like a scroll of spit and sliding, read with the mouth instead of the eyes, and sprouting a few multicoloured flourishes and illuminations as he improvised upon themes. Memory and theory turned into instinct and impulse, and it worked, oh, did it work. He found it silly that some thought this act subservient, for his control of Crowley’s pleading body was so complete, the motion of it so primally focused, and his decision to let Crowley have the more urgent pace he wanted, so very much that of a benevolent ruler.

He wanted Crowley’s taste in his mouth soon, anyhow – communion in this church of the body. And after Crowley clenched up and gave it, swearing improbable oaths in a choked whisper, he sank to his knees again before the angel on the throne, praising much and repenting nothing. His hands curled around Aziraphale’s legs. Aziraphale wiped a line of sweat from just below Crowley’s ear.

“Liked that a lot,” Crowley said inadequately.

“Yes, dear.”

When it came down to it, what they’d done had taken far less time than it had seemed. Aziraphale’s trousers were miraculously retrieved from their brief holiday on a tropical island (where they’d been mistaken for another inexplicable airdrop from the Dharma Initiative). The attendant looked slightly flushed himself, though that may have been due to the effort of remaining in denial that the figures in the murals were _moving_ — trapped in their two-dimensional space, locked in their perpetual unspeakable acts. But he was pleased that the two gentlemen crossed the fine line between "tip" and "bribe" with impeccable etiquette.

At the table, there was coffee and port; strawberries and cream and . . . Havana cigars. Crowley laughed as he lit Aziraphale’s, just as the angel noticed with disapproval that the demon hadn’t quite removed all traces of giveaway dishevelment from himself, and that he planted himself beside Aziraphale—and quite close at that, an arm around his shoulders-- instead of across from him. Show-off.

“No mere cigarette will suffice after that,” Crowley said.

 

“I’m not sure I ought to approve of smoking,” Aziraphale said, watching grey wisps from Crowley’s lips, tasting air flavoured earthly-ethereal, rich and thick.

“Beats burning,” Crowley laughed, a little giddy.

Aziraphale sighed to think of how this process of learning to behave properly in human places involved so much trial and error.

***

Within these hallowed halls  
One knows not revenge.  
And should a person have fallen,  
Love will guide him to duty.  
Then wanders he on the hand of a friend  
Cheerful and happy into a better land.

Within these hallowed walls,  
Where human loves the human,  
No traitor can lurk,  
Because one forgives the enemy.  
Whomever these lessons do not please,  
Deserves not to be a human being.  
\--Sarastro, “The Magic Flute”


End file.
